FriendlyELEC’s latest tiny computers measure just about 1.6″ x 1.6″ and sell for as little as $8.
The NanoPi NEO Core is a tiny single board computer with a quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 processor, a micro USB port, a microSD card slot, GPIO pins, and integrated memory and storage.
There’s also a $25 model called the NanoPi NEO Core2 that has a 64-bit Allwinner H5 ARM Cortex-A53 and more memory.
These tiny systems aren’t quite as user-friendly as a Raspberry Pi or other single-board computers that also have built-in ports for HDMI, Ethernet, and USB Type-A connections. But if you don’t want to mess with the GPIO pins, you can also opt for an $11 Mini Shield accessory that gives you extra ports plus an M.2 2242 SSD slot.
The Mini Shield gives you an audio jack, two USB host ports, an IR receiver, and an Ethernet jack. It measures about the same size as a Raspberry Pi, which means you could fit the shield + NanoPi Core (or Core2) in a case designed for a Raspberry Pi.
An entry-level NanoPi Neo Core comes with 256MB of DDR3 RAM and no storage. you can pay an extra $10 to get a model with 512MB of memory and 8GB of EMMC storage.
The entry-level NanoPi Neo Core2 comes with 1GB of RAM and 8GB of eMMC storage.
Both models support microSD cards up to 64GB.
via CNX-Software
What is the use for this?
It’s a head-less device with more processing power than a RPi Zero… for a similar price. I personally don’t do projects in this operating space.
Hmm… I don’t see the video breakout on the GPIO diagram, so only SPI displays for this one? That might be a problem on higher resolutions…
Yeah, HDMI pins not connected https://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wiki/images/f/f0/NanoPi_NEO_Core-V1.0_1705.pdf That means no direct video output.